All posts tagged Norbert Lammert

Back from a hiking vacation in the Italian Alps, Angela Merkel is facing an uphill struggle at home in Berlin.

The German Chancellor needs to convince her own ranks of decisions taken at a recent European Union summit, and quell criticism about an extension to controversial purchases by the European Central Bank of sovereign bonds of troubled euro members.

Throwing ever more tax payers’ money at the euro zone’s troubled southern fringe is increasingly unpopular among Germany’s population, and both heavy weights in Mrs. Merkel’s center-right coalition and government backbenchers have been balking against it.

To repeatedly buy bonds of troubled euro zone countries is transferring their debt to the European Union, with Germany in the end having to pay for the bulk of it, Bavarian State Premier Horst Seehofer told the ARD broadcaster Sunday.

“We don’t want that,” he said, adding that his Christian Social Union, or CSU, won’t support such moves. The CSU is the Bavarian sister party of Mrs. Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and Mrs. Merkel needs its votes to guarantee the government’s majority in the Bundestag, as the German parliament is called.

“It wasn’t the original intention of the founders of the euro to collectivize debt in Europe,” Mr. Schäffler said. He predicts that to have an effect, the bond purchases will have to be done more often and at higher volumes, limiting the independence of the ECB.